A media device at a media consumption site may receive audio information from a content generator in an object-based format. The media device may be a television, a portable computing device such as a phone or a tablet, or a device at a movie theater. The audio information may comprise audio items, where each audio item comprises portions of audio content and position metadata indicating a location in a virtual sound plane at which the sound content portion is intended to play. Position values corresponding to a content portion may be associated with time values that indicate the positions at which the content portion is to be played at each of a plurality of different times. The location may be a location relative to an expected location of the listener or relative to the screen at which related video will played at the media consumption site. For example, a particular audio item may indicate that a certain content portion is to first to be played to the left of the seating area, then behind the seating area, and then to the right of the seating area. The playing of the audio content portions at these positions may simulate the sound of an object flying around the listener.
Audio content may also be received in ring-based channel format. Audio information in a ring-based channel format indicates the “position” of a sound by indicating an amount of signal corresponding to each channel of a set of channels. Each channel in the set of channels corresponds to a position on an imaginary ring of a set of imaginary rings of different height surrounding a particular point or area that may represent the expected location of a listener. As an example, particular content may be intended to be heard from the back left and upper portion of a room by a listener. Audio information associated with the particular content may specify a large amount of signal for a channel corresponding to a particular position on a particular ring, where the plane of the particular ring is higher than ear-level and the particular position on the particular ring is behind and to the left of the expected location of the listener. The audio information may also indicate smaller, but non-zero, signal amounts for other positions on the particular ring, and other rings, that are located nearby to the particular position on the particular ring.
A renderer at a media consumption site may render the received audio content by determining, for each audio content portion that is to be played, the amount of audio signal that should be sent to each speaker at the media consumption site for the audio content portion.
The rendering of audio content in object-based audio format and ring-based channel format may create undesired results in certain speaker configurations, particularly when there are too few speakers in certain areas of the media consumption site. For example, if certain audio content has an intended position of being behind the seating area and there are no speakers behind the seating area, playing that audio content through any other speaker without any augmentation may create an audio effect that is different than intended by the content producers.
Additionally, in some cases, playing the audio content through some other speaker without any augmentation may affect the audibility of other audio components. Consider an example where audio content comprising music is intended to be played at speakers behind the seating area while audio content comprising dialog is intended to be played at speakers in front of the seating area. At a particular media consumption site, there may be no speakers behind the seating area. At such a particular media consumption site, the music audio content may be played in front of the seating area. However, mixing both music audio content and dialog audio content may impair the audibility of the dialog audio content for a listener at the media consumption site.
The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section. Similarly, issues identified with respect to one or more approaches should not assume to have been recognized in any prior art on the basis of this section, unless otherwise indicated.